-- But a certain inventor conceived a device alleged to be capable of reversing the flow of time, and a test subject was required to verify his claim. Intrigued, Urchin's owner offered her. She was ideal on two main counts. First, she was exceptionally intelligent and would be well able to observe her surroundings and leave reports, time-capsule-fashion, filling in the blanks of history. Second, since theory did not rule out the chance of history being changed by her intrusion, and since the greatest change would be wrought by the birth of a child who should not have been born, the emissary would have to be sterile.
-- Additionally, she was willing to go. She knew that if she stayed her master would condemn her mind to be blotted out.
-- Nonetheless, as an extra precaution, they employed the hypnosis to which she had already been made fantastically susceptible to equip her with yet more weapons than she already possessed, and two sorts of armour. Since in the era where they expected her to arrive the common tongue had altered radically, they gave her a knowledge of it that might pass for a native's. Also they trained her like an escapologist in the subject of evading restraints: locks, bars, shackles, anything. She had put that technique to use, chiefly in order to satisfy herself that she had an escape route if she wanted one, as soon as she could after arriving at Chent. She really had filched something from Madge Phelps -- not the hair-brush she had been accused of coveting, but some hair-clips, with which she unscrewed the plate covering the keyhole and later picked the lock.
-- By contrast the first kind of armour she was given failed her the instant she encountered Faberdown and realised from his language and clothing that something had gone wrong. It was a carefully faked background enabling her to establish herself in the time she had been sent to if she was questioned by the Lord of West Mountain's police. By contrast with the planet-wide hell she had left behind, she had looked forward to the Age of Confusion as paradisal, despite its local wars and primitive superstition. Stranded, she despaired and hoped by turns. When she was locked up in Chent she took it for granted that she had come to another world like her own where the majority of the population were crowded into giant barracks like cattle and only the chosen few could claim to enjoy their lives, with one extra restriction still more terrible: they were deprived of the comfort of making love.
-- Having discovered that those about her were irrational, she began to apply her mind fiercely to unravelling the mystery of what had happened to her. Here there is and has been from the start a half-truth, but now the halfness is not due to deception, only to the foggy mind which will not wrestle the ideas into a pattern. She said tonight that originally she did believe what she once told me, that she had been displaced sideways to another branch of time because even the intrusion of a single individual might so affect the course of her remembered history that her departure failed to take place, an impossible paradox. But later, having learned much she did not know before, about the working of cars, about the time-scale of the history she found in books, she changed her mind and did not tell me for fear of hurting me. She thinks now -- or thought this evening -- there is only one history after all: no branching river delta, simply a crooked road. They hurled her back along it not for the planned five hundred years, but for something more like ten thousand, to an age when there is still coal, and oil, and unmined ore, being prodigally squandered before our civiisation is ruined by its extravagance and collapses so completely that wandering savages out of Central Asia have to learn the art of writing over again from degenerates notching strips of wood with rusty knives. She thought the great empire which fell in the dawn of time and left a few scattered relics for her own people to find might correspond to Rome; discovering that this did not fit, she deduced that it was before Rome's rise that her history branched off. But ultimately she came to the conclusion that the great forgotten civilisation must be ours.
-- She's right, though, about history resisting change. The other layer of her armour worked too well, and hid her inmost mind from me against her will, until tonight. It consisted in a vision of a future so infinitely desirable that even if through persistence, or torture, or sheer chance the people of the past came to believe she was a visitor out of time, they would be afraid to act otherwise than as history would later record for fear of preventing the creation of Llanraw. Almost, they made it more real to her than the truth; so too have sometimes seemed my visions of disaster.
-- They were very clever, the bastards who sent her forth. Even in the instant when she finally broke free, they dug her a pit into which, freely, she fell. For I could not bear the comfort she offered me in the last words I shall ever hear from her, though "they" had left her nothing else to give.
-- I railed crazily at the mess that I am stranded in for the sake of the lie called Llanraw: a penniless fugitive in a foreign land. And she said piteously, "But, Paul, in your world I think a girl can earn much money if she is good at making love . . ."
The wind was driving the waves like wild animals in stampede. They were washing around Paul's ankles. The shock of their chill brought uppermost in his mind a momentary flash of the person he had once known by his own name, as a capsized boat may be briefly righted by the caprice of the gale.
Shuddering, he turned as though to head towards the town. He stared at its dotted lights, the only symbol perceptible which might define his familiar world.
But instead of taking even one pace towards it, he simply stood where he was, feeling the salt water leach away the doubts and suspicions and uncertainties he had rediscovered a few heartbeats ago. He had thought to arrive at truth when he confronted the incongruities in Urchin's former story; be could not bear to think himself doubly deceived. There was no going back for any reason, even disbelief. He could not return to an earlier time.
Resolutely he set his back to Louze again and began to unbutton his shirt.
-- I know what I know. I know that because you do as you do, you there on shore behind those yellow cheerful lights, one day your children's children's children will be made barren to amuse a tyrant. I know that they will sweat away a weary drab hopeless existence in barracks bigger than a modern city, scrawny with hunger and disease because what little there is goes always to "them." I could warn you, I could change the doom written in those stars up there . . .
-- And I won't.
He let the shirt blow away and kicked off his shoes.
-- Count what you took from me, you sons of devils. Count carefully. All chance of happiness when you wished on me pushful parents ("my son's a good boy he's going to be a doctor!"), a marriage ("what makes you so sure it's your child I want to get rid of?"), children ("standing bloody joke in every medical school in Britain!"), the career I'd laboured for ("General Medical Council"), and, latest, most hurtful, beloved stranger Urchin.
He looked dully at his watch. Thirty minutes gone. In the hotel-room, still and white as wax. He took the watch off and hurled it into the sea.
Then, stripped, he waded after it, his limbs numb so that they would not have obeyed his instructions to swim even if he had remembered the desire to, until the wind lifted the sea above his head and he walked on steadily towards lost Llanraw, with a single thought ringing around his skull so loudly he was sure all the people in the world must hear him before that and every other thought ceased.
-- So I don't care, damn you! I don't care!
JOHN BRUNNER in DAW editions:
THE BOOK OF JOHN BRUNNER. A personal anthology
of Brunner's multifold talents: stories, articles, poems.
etc. A feast for Brunner fans! (#UY1213 -- $1.25)
TOTAL ECLIPSE. The enigma of a deserted planet boded
ill for the future of nearby Terra. Brunner at his contro-
versiaI best. (#UY1193 -- $1.25)
THE STARDROPPERS. They tuned in on the cosmos -- and
tuned out the world! (#UY1197 -- $1.25)
ENTRY TO ELSEWHEN. A triple treasure of space, time
and dimension. (#UY1144 -- $1
.25)
THE STONE THAT NEVER CAME DOWN. The final climac-
tic hour of today's world -- and a last minute remedy.
(#UY115O -- $1.25)
POLYMATH. Their leader on that alien planetfall was a
genius -- on the wrong world's ecology!
(#UY1217 -- $1 .25)
-----------------------------------------------------
DAW BOOKS are represented by the publishers of Signet
and Mentor Books, THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, INC.
-----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY, INC.,
P.O. Box 999, Bergenfield, New Jersey 07621
Please send me the DAW BOOKS I have checked above. I am enclosing
$_____________ (check or money order -- no currency or C.0.D.'s).
Please include the list price plus 25˘ a copy to cover mailing costs.
Name_________________________________________________________________
Address______________________________________________________________
City____________________State_________ Zip Code______________________
Please allow at least 3 weeks for delivery
JOHN BRUNNER
She appeared in our world naked, defenseless,
unable to say a word anyone could understand.
Her origin was at first simply a puzzle, then a
scientific enigma, and finally a series of terrifying
surmises that her most fascinated investigator was
afraid to probe.
But probe he must, for somehow he know that this
strange girl was a key to the kind of information
science had sought for centuries. But the more he
uncovered from the depths of her mind, the
deeper became the quicksand into which his own
was sinking.
John Brunner, Hugo-winning author, presents in
QUICKSAND one of his most unusual and
thought-provoking science fiction novels.
-------------FROM DAW-------------
By John Brunner:
THE WRONG END OF TIME (UY1246 -- $1.25)
THE BOOK OF JOHN BRUNNER (UY1213 -- $1.25)
POLYMATH (UY1217 -- $1.25)
TOTAL ECLIPSE (UY1193 -- $1.25)
THE STARDROPPERS (UY1197 -- $1.25)
ENTRY TO ELSEWHEN (UY1154 -- $1.25)
THE STONE THAT NEVER CAME DOWN (UY1150 -- $1.25)
John Brunner, Quicksand
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends